


when love became an act of defiance

by orphan_account



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: F/F, Hunters of Artemis, Lesbian Artemis (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Twelve Gods of Olympus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), development???, hyejoo is artemis and she is gay, what is plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-28 23:28:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21400405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: the gods make habit of hiding, but sometimes, it's too hard.
Relationships: Park Chaewon | Go Won/Son Hyejoo | Olivia Hye
Comments: 8
Kudos: 33





	when love became an act of defiance

**Author's Note:**

> title from june - florence and the machine! i wrote this maybe eight months ago and never posted, and i also haven't written prose since then so :D

the trees and the river bow as the huntresses pass. they sing praises for the moon, for the goddess of the hunt from the floating island full of yellow flowers. they’d create a landslide in her honor, destroy any who came between her and her wants. but olivia doesn’t want it. she’s too kind to deny it, but she moves onto another forest with great urgency.

she knows well the story of her mother, chased to the very end of the earth to bring olivia and her brother into the world. it is really she who gifted them with bows and arrows.

enter chaewon, born to a foolish king, perpetually cursed to live in death; first she’s just another member of a goddess’s golden ring of followers, but olivia sees the fire’s shadows dancing on her face like puppet shows, and she sees beauty.

the name rolls off her tongue like wine the first time she calls it aloud. beautiful, raw, everything natural ruled by her. and on the receiving end, chaewon shudders because, god, such sweet beckoning should not exist outside song.

olivia tells her a story of the first lovers and how they spent eons apart before they were together for too little.

her lady has always been alluring to her. chaewon has seen olivia sitting by lakesides with her silver bow strung on her back as if it were not a burden to carry, seen her face upturned with a simple joy when no blood is shed. she feels a lump in her throat.

this, is a sink into love. an emotion rooted, fully deep-seated in fear, bounded by obsequies and mellow truths and lies told under a blazen sky. convolution, fingers tightened in metal coils unable to escape. sinking into love, like sinking into the riverbed; dirt wedged in between fingernails and twigs in hair. the huntresses pledge themselves to chastity, but alas, love is allowed as long as you hide the truth.

on one night olivia stares the moon high above her when all is quiet, and everyone is asleep. everyone except the quiet owner of a little voice in the dark who pleads to be heard by at least one willing deity. olivia identifies her with hunger for desire that is now satisfied; and olivia can’t read minds, but she hears the tremors in the low timbre of chaewon’s rasp. it tastes like a demand on her lips the moment she hears it again. neither of them come close to minding the price of beginning something one can’t think to end; the next day the other huntresses ask chaewon why she slept beside her ladylike more than a mortal companion, and the answers don’t come, so with this she knows the price will be paid over the course of her terribly short lifetime.

olivia thinks chaewon is like her father. a wonderful, horrible fool who has done good to counterpoise their blasphemy, and chaewon’s good and chaewon’s blasphemy are the very same things—capturing a goddess with one lip coyly tucked beneath the other and a quiver of cupid’s arrows on her back. but chaewon is naive. she doesn’t know that olivia does not fall in love so easily as she has.

however, olivia thinks herself to be unlike her father in every way. he is a liar, a cheater, a destroyer of too many lives in retrospect. he is, though, the god of the sky and everything crushed beneath; no one dares desert the temples.

“my lady,” chaewon questions once, “do you believe in the now?”

“i’ve had many more ‘now’s than you, more than your father, more than your grandfather. the now is the only thing i can believe in because it is my present and my future.”

“i put my faith in the present.” water rushes against their legs. “yet those around me seem to focus their visions in a future determined by throwing a die to the sky.”

“when one has lived this long, they learn to stop seeking for a destination.” olivia abandons the brookside. that twilight, chaewon stalks to where olivia sleeps and prays to a goddess who lies beside her. by the time she twists over her shoulder, the one who she knows mumbled with such abandon now sleeps with moon shot dripping along her cheeks. the woods whisper to olivia that chaewon is beautiful, and she can’t deny the dreary smile she gives.

the huntresses celebrate the sky with wild berries and the reaps of the day’s hunt roasting on the flame. they do it quietly with nature in mind, chuckling under their breaths when jokes are cracked, and when almost everyone has fallen asleep around the fire, chaewon crawls closer, raspberry on her lips. she welcomes the fire like it’s her mother, and it crackles in return. some time after the last sparks extinguish, olivia counts the freckles on chaewon’s bare skin like constellations; and chaewon smiles.

olivia knows the kisses she grants her are not acts of providence.

chaewon sits on the edge of a high cliff after bathing in a thunderstorm. it’s an established ritual no one questions, not even the goddess. she stands, eyes closed, singing devotion to the depths of the ocean and the highest of skies and the scalding underground, and olivia knows she calls to her father and her uncles. for what, she would like to know.

lightning strikes, and the cliff falls. olivia jolts awake from the shaking pulsating through the tree and the ground she sleeps against and the clamorous prayer outstanding from all the others buzzing within her ears. the cliff falls, so does the person perched there, and olivia curses her father infinitely. curse the god of everything, and let him curse me tenfold. but once chaewon rests peacefully along with trees and the flowers she once strung to her bow, and this is all over, olivia vows, the temples will be hollow.

she cannot lie that she lied that night under the moon when she declared her faith to the now, and she notices the taste of blasphemy through her tears.


End file.
